Allchorn Design

The Collective are a design and branding agency in Johannesburg, South Africa. I’ve worked with the principal designer there, Leigh Dyson on a couple of projects in the past, and we share a few clients.
They do some truly amazing work in the print field and have an impressive client list.
The design of their site was [...]

Things Evolve, you can’t avoid that
You can’t always predict every facet of a project’s lifespan. Things change and evolve as you work on it. As detailed a scoping document you draw up, there are more often than not extenuating circumstances that influence the workflow and final result of any project.

client expectations may differ from those [...]

Since I’ve recently taken a step back from certain aspects of website design and development (specifically hosting, coding and marketing), I’m delving more and more into the layout and aesthetic concerns of creating a website. That doesn’t mean that I don’t go through the proper discovery steps that precede the design phases, but since I [...]

Mr/Mrs Client:
“Whip me together a quick newsletter to send to my subscribers. Oh, and make it look like this design”…
I am then handed a design created by a print designer. Background images, fancy fonts, overlaying text etc.
“It needs to look exactly like that and must work in all mail clients.”
Wow, thanks… I’ll get right on [...]

I’ve decided that I am going to re-brand myself. Starting with a new logo. Quite honestly, I’m sick of my glassy globe with cheesily gradiented AD.
The direct metaphor of the earth representing the “world” wide web being the audience of my creations is replaced with a pretty direct graphic representing design in the form of [...]

High levels of stress and a reasonably obvious truth have driven me to write this post. A rather corny title it may be, it’s pretty spot on to what this is all about. It all stems from the true nature of the internet, and the common misconceptions of what that true nature really is.
Defining The [...]

I’m busy writing about three articles concurrently. All of which lose my interest after sitting in front of them for longer than 10 minutes. I need to step back from them for a bit and this is why I’m writing this interim post. One is a piece on big brands with horrible websites, another is [...]

Being the fact that I am in the website design industry, this post relates first and foremost to that specific line of design, but some parallels can surely be drawn with other forms of design.
First and foremost, my favourite saying is:
“Design is not about making things pretty, but rather about making things work.”
I don’t know [...]

No rest for the wicked, or should that be “no rest for the industrious”. I’m hoping the latter is the case as I don’t feel particularly wicked. With a slow start to 2008, things have thankfully picked up quite considerably around here.
From the inception of a new professional photography service called From the Camera with [...]

I’m busy working on and have recently launched a beta(ish) version of a new concept. It’s called Sitepress and it’s a combination of all my accumulated website design, content management and consulting knowledge rolled into one offering. It has a twist however, and one I hope will bring professional website design to those that previously [...]